BBC Four: Barney's Cremaster Cycle initially seems baffling, but Barney seemed the artist in the series most open to interpreting his work.
Ben Lewis: I think his work is an exercise in interpretation, or in the creation of meaning. It's quite unusual in terms of contemporary art, maybe he'll set a trend. People weren't supposed to make allegories until Matthew Barney came along, that all went out three or four hundred years ago. Works of art just weren't meant to mean anything, they were just meant to be. It wasn't a symbol, unless it was a symbol of itself. But Barney says "This is a kind of story, where this character means x and this one means y and they're doing that because it symbolises something. It's quite old fashioned and complicated, like Dürer etchings.

BBC Four: Do you think there's any self-mockery going on under this exploration of meaning?
BL: I don't think there's much humour in the work of Matthew Barney. My films about the other artists in the series are funny, but Matthew Barney, no.

BBC Four: You would say that the sheep bagpipes are completely serious?
BL: I would say they are deadly serious, because they're symbols of biological and musical creation. That's what it is and you're not meant to laugh. You don't laugh when you look at it - it looks great. It looks like it's made out of icing sugar which is even weirder.

BBC Four: Although Barney's films have very high production values they still look at basic activities in the same way early video artists did, he seems to be inspired by basic things like biology and sport.
BL: I think that he's taking the language of 16th Century Mannerist painting and applying it to the concerns of these "body artists" and conceptual artists. They were all interested in the body, down to the simplest act and what it meant to do something - to break a twig or lean two pieces of heavy metal against each other, or create a wall which changed one's sightline across a square. Barney's taken those concerns and said, "Well they mean something, how the world is created according to the human body, what we're capable of".

BBC Four: You call your film Church of Cremaster, what do you think is Barney's world view? Is there a God?
BL: I think his God is the body. I think that's the difference between Barney and the Romantics. Ever since the Enlightenment, the meaning of human existence has become embedded in the world around us, in landscape and architecture. The Romantics looked at a misty landscape and saw the mystery of God in it, they looked at sailing boats disappearing into the distance and they saw a symbol of death and one's passage from an earthly existence to heaven, they saw a ruined Gothic cathedral as a symbol of the timelessness of religion. Barney however, he's looking around going "It's not God, it's my body". This opera house, it's my chest, this race track, it's my circulatory system.

He's quite close to the Symbolists you see, it's not just 16th Century allegory, there's a whole history of the use of symbols in art and the Mannerists are using quite established allegorical codes based on mythology, in the film we look at the picture An Allegory with Venus and Cupid by Bronzino and you can see in the picture Venus meaning love, Cupid desire but by the time you get to the Symbolists at the end of the 19th Century they're magpieing mythical codes from all sorts of places: India and classical mythology, Christian mythology, fairy tales and literature and jumbling it all up. Barney has moved on a stage from that and is constructing his own symbols, some of which comes from Freemasonary and some from Greek mythology but some of which has just come out of his own head.

BBC Four: What is he working on now?
BL: He made some rather attractive glass tables that were at the Venice Biennale. The sort that you think should be made out of gold but they're made out of green Venice glass. That's his latest thing, it looked a bit overdone to me.